Though there are enormous amount of information available in the web, only very small portion of the available information is visible to the users. Due to the non-visibility of huge information, the traditional search engines cannot index or access all information present in the web. The main challenge in the mining of the relevant information from a huge hidden web database is to identify the entry points to access the hidden web databases. The existing web crawlers cannot retrieve all information from the hidden web databases. To retrieve all the relevant information from the hidden web, this paper proposes an architecture that uses genetic algorithm and intelligent agents for accessing hidden web databases. The proposed architecture is termed as genetic algorithm-based intelligent multi-agent system (GABIAS). The experimental results show that the proposed architecture provides better precision and recall than the existing web crawlers. Copyright © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.